News About IDAV

Serban Porumbescu and Ken Joy organized an new course in the Computer Science Department at UC Davis during the fall quarter, entitled "Introduction to IPhone Application Development." This extremely popular course received rave reviews from the students, as was recently reported in CNET news. Porumbescu was a graduate student in IDAV and received his Ph.D. in 2008. He currently works for Tapulous, a company that produces IPhone Applications.

IDAV Researchers chaired two tutorials at IEEE VisWeek 2009, held in Atlantic City NJ, from October 11-16, 2009. Christoph Garth chaired a well-attended tutorial on flow visualization and Hank Childs and Sean Ahern (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) hosted a VisIt tutorial. An excellent review of the VisIt tutorial was written up in vizworld.com.

IDAV offers an IPhone Application Development Course through the Computer Science Department

Ken Joy and Serban Porumbescu are offering an IPhone Application Development Course through the Computer Science Department at UC Davis. This course, numbered ECS 189H, leads the students through the App Development Process, culminating with projects that can be submitted to the ITunes App Store. The course is available on ITunesU.

September 28, 2009

Hank Childs appointed chief architect for a new Visualization and Analysis Center at TACC

Hank Childs has been appointed chief software architect for a new Visualization and Data Analysis Center at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The National Science Foundation, through the eXtremeDigital program, has awarded a $7 million grant to TACC that will provide a comprehensive visualization and data analysis to the open science community. Childs, a chief architect of VisIt package, a large scale visualization package will be working to expand visualization and data analysis tools for the Teragrid community.

Michael Neff Receives a $242K CreativeIT Award from NSF to study how computer tools support creativity

The National Science Foundation has awarded Michael Neff $245,000 for a
three year study entitled "Increasing Creative Exploration with Computer
Tools that Support Spontaneity and Embodiment". The study will examine
whether graphics applications that focus on providing 3D gestural
interfaces and allow spontaneous exploration can increase users
creativity.

August 20, 2009

VACET/IDAV Featured in Wired Science's Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009

The video "Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Recycling Nuclear Reactor" was featured by Wired Science as one of the best science visualization videos of 2009. This video shows turbulent flow of coolant into a moc-up of an advanced recycling nuclear reactor. The video was generated by Hank Childs of VACET/IDAV, Paul Fischer, Aleks Obabko, Dave Pointer and Andrew Siegel.

Led by Hank Childs, a team of researchers from the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) recently ran a series of experiments demonstrating that VisIt, a parallel visualization and analysis tool could be used on massive datasets ranging from 500 billion to four trillion zones running on four of the world's 12 most powerful supercomputers. This effort demonstrated that VisIt's parallelism approach can take advantage of the growing number of cores powering these advanced supercomputers. VACET is a collaborative effort between UC Davis, the University of Utah, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Ken Joy and Christoph Garth $450,000 for a three year study of "Lagrangian Visualization Methods for Very Large Time-Dependent Vector Fields." This research promises to develop new methods that address the expensive computation of integral curves in Lagrangian methods, making new techniques available resulting from improved interactivity of these methods. It will allow these methods to be applied to large-scale problems and data sets, which they currently cannot address.

August 15, 2009

Michael Neff Awarded CAREER Award by NSF

Professor Michael Neff has received the NSF CAREER award for his project titled "Generative Models for Character Animation and Gesture in the New Age of Art and Electronic Interaction." This research will develop new models of human movement to be used in character animation applications such as movies, games, and online worlds.

Hank Childs, architect of VisIt -- one of the most popular frameworks for data analysis and visualization, has joined IDAV as a Professional Researcher. Childs, who holds a half-time appointment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory comes to Davis after nearly a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was a member of the original VisIt development team. Hank, a member of our DoE VACET project, will concentrate on large-scale visualization projects while working at IDAV.

Ken Joy and John Owens receive $800K Grant from NNSA to Study New Methods for "Large-Scale Aerial Video"

Ken Joy and John Owens has been awarded an $800K grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration to study "Real-Time Three-Dimensional Exploration of Wide-Area High-Resolution." This three-year study will focus on development of new algorithms for visualizing moving elements in an "urban" environment, based upon large-scale aerial video images.

June 10, 2009

John Owens receives an HP Labs Innovation Award

John Owens received an HP Labs Innovation Research Program Award for
his research in "GPU Completeness: Computational Patterns and Analysis
for GPU Computing"

Ken Joy receives "Professor of the Year" award from the UC Davis Computer Science Club

Ken Joy has been awarded the "Professor of the Year" by the UC Davis Computer Science Club. This award is given by the students of the University each academic year.

June 10, 2009

John Owens receives ECE Graduate Student Award

John Owens was named a finalist for the ASUCD Excellence in Education
Award (College of Engineering) and the winner of the ECE Graduate
Student Association Award for Graduate Teaching and Mentorship.

May 10, 2009

Pinar Nuyan-Ozcelik a finalist for the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik was a finalist for the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, which supports undergraduate and graduate women to obtain advanced degrees in computer science related fields. Less than 50 applicants were chosen as finalists.

Mauricio-Hess Flores has been awarded a Lawrence Scholar Fellowship by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He will be collaborating with groups at the Lab working on large-scale aerial survelliance. The fellowship will fund him through his Ph.D. studies.

January 10, 2009

Attila Gyulassy's topology work in the news

Graduate Student Attila Gyulassy, with Valerio Pascucci and Bernd Hamann have developed a new algorithm that detects features and patterns in complex scientifici data sets. This effort has been reported by a number of science news agencies, and can be accessed through the cite referenced below